Love Song for the Life of the Mind: An Essay on the Purpose of Comedy

353 Pages·2007·1.729 MB·English

by  Gene Fendt

Copyright 2007. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
Love Song for the Life of the Mind

Love Song for the Life of the Mind
An EssAy on thE PurPosE of ComEdy
Gene Fendt
thE CAtholiC univErsity of AmEriCA PrEss
WAshington, d.C.
Copyright © 2007
The Catholic University of America Press
All rights reserved
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, Ansi Z39.48-1984.
∞
librAry of CongrEss CAtAloging-in-PubliCAtion dAtA
Fendt, Gene, 1955–
Love song for the life of the mind : an essay on the purpose of comedy / Gene Fendt.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-8132-1485-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8132-1485-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Comic, The. 2. Comedy.
3. Aristotle. 4. Iphigenia (Greek mythology) 5. Tragedy. I. Title.
b105.C456f46 2007
809'.917—dc22
2006021105
Metuunt cupiuntque, dolent gaudentque,
et quia rectus est amor eorum,
istas omnes affectiones rectas habent.
—De Civitate Dei 14.9
To all those whom I have not loved properly,
and for Joan Kung, teacher

Contents
Preface ix
A Note on Key Words and References xix
Works and Editions of Aristotle xxiii
Acknowledgments xxv
Propylaia 1
1. The Problem of the Iphigenia and the Purposes of Tragedy 13
Backstage and the Wings: Of Poetics and Poetics 13
The Problem of Aristotle’s Evaluation of Iphigenia 25
Some Attempted Solutions: The Fallacy of Aristotelian Formalism 27
Of Strong and Painful Passions 40
Catharsis 56
Thaumaturgy: Hecuba 68
The Problem and the Play 68
Catharsis and the Movement of Emotion 70
Catharsis of the Excessive and the Deficient 71
Catharsis and the Virtuous 80
Mise en abyme: The Hecuba of Hamlet 82
Catharsis and Intellectual Clarification 83
Other Concomitants of Catharsis 86
Conclusions on Some Recent Criticism of Hecuba 90
The Case of the Iphigenia 97
Resolving the Contradiction between Poetics 13 and 14 103
2. The Purpose of Comedy 108
Formal, Material, and Efficient Causes 108
Mise en abyme: The Socrates and Phaedrus of Phaedrus 111
The Problem of Comedy’s Final Cause 121
Comic Catharsis 140
The Example of a Falling Comedy: Hippias Major 157
What Art Is Not For 170
viii 3. The Exemplary Comic Fiction: Resolution, Catharsis, 178
and Culture in As You Like It
Contents Resolution and Catharsis 178
Comic Catharsis and Culture 196
Emblematic Appendix on the Character of Audrey 205
The Freedom of Aesthetic Judgment, or “Much Virtue in ‘If’” 214
4. A Love Song for the Life of the Mind: Arcadia 236
Happiness, Politics, and Art 236
Eudaimonia and Politics: The Errors of Inclusivism 238
Art and Eudaimonia: The Mimesis of Joy 256
Arcadia: A Love Song for the Life of the Mind 261
Plot 261
Characters 264
The Comedy as Love Song 268
Epilogue: “Still awake and drinking”: Symposium 223c, d 284
Selected Bibliography 307
Index 317
PrefaCe
“As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion bequeathed me by will......”
As You Like It 1.1.1
This is to be a book about the purposes of comedy, by which I mean in
the first instance the dramatic art that the ordinary educated imagination
unproblematically traces back from contemporary playwrights and movie
makers (like Stoppard) through Shakespeare to Aristophanes. It is written
in such a way as to open occasionally on to issues of high or scatological hu-
mor, jokes, and recreation, and, still at a distance, to adumbrate a parallel
between the dramatic genre of comedy and what might be styled (against an
author of my existentialist youth) the comic sense of life. There are voices in
Kierkegaard who suggest that the comic or humorous borders the religious,
and there is a long tradition that styles human life as a comedy, sometimes
with the superscript “divine.” Those latter filiations will be more frequent
and obvious than the first sort, but all of them—scatological, recreational,
cultural, and religious—are shadowy filiations outside the main focus of the
present study. It is at least historically fitting that the traces of religious dis-
course should be more obvious in this discussion, since in both its ancient
instantiation and its later medieval rebirth comedy had a place in religious
festival and at the very least lived in close proximity to liturgy. It is possible
to consider jokes as the last reduction of such liturgy, or perhaps the smallest
crumb of its real presence.
To write a book in aesthetics has seldom been a clear-edged project, and
it seems altogether more questionable these days, for there are critics who
will argue against the very possibility of interpretation, as well as those who
will question any particular’s validity. The world of aesthetics seems to be
one in which any presumed facts are overdetermined by theoretical (or prac-
ix